Running Xpdf

To generate a PostScript file, hit the "print" button in xpdf, or runpdftops:

pdftops file.pdf

To generate a plain text file, run pdftotext:

pdftotext file.pdf

There are four additional utilities (which are fully described intheir man pages):

pdfinfo -- dumps a PDF file's Info dictionary (plus some other useful information) pdffonts -- lists the fonts used in a PDF file along with various information for each font pdftoppm -- converts a PDF file to a series of PPM/PGM/PBM-format bitmaps pdfimages -- extracts the images from a PDF file

Command line options and many other details are described in the manpages (xpdf.1, etc.) and the VMS help files (xpdf.hlp, etc.).

What is Xpdf

Xpdf is an open source viewer for Portable Document Format (PDF)files. (These are also sometimes also called 'Acrobat' files, fromthe name of Adobe's PDF software.) The Xpdf project also includes aPDF text extractor, PDF-to-PostScript converter, and various otherutilities.

Xpdf runs under the X Window System on UNIX, VMS, and OS/2. The non-Xcomponents (pdftops, pdftotext, etc.) also run on Win32 systems andshould run on pretty much any system with a decent C++ compiler.

Xpdf is designed to be small and efficient. It can use Type 1 orTrueType fonts.